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Comment by sonar_un | Hacker News Reader

Stopped when he said he waited forever to get naturalized, skipping 6 years, and then saying he never got his permanent resident card, so he was just living off renewed visas, and they thought it was strange.

It is strange. A lot of the things he said he needed, would have been done in the permanent residence portion of his time in Japan. Just as it is in any country.

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I know a few folks personally who got rejected for PR but got approved for citizenship. First, both of these get handled by different branches of government with the different screening guidelines (often not published). Second, perception differs: for a long time PR was viewed as something like 'all the benefits of living in Japan without any consequences', so the income requirements were stricter etc. (albeit all of this is changing now and it's difficult to say what will be the final state).

> A lot of the things he said he needed, would have been done in the permanent residence portion of his time in Japan.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Having PR isn't a prerequisite for naturalization, nor does it waive any of the requirements. Do you mean he should have collected extra copies of documents and applied for PR in parallel?

I have PR and only needed a small fraction of this stuff.

Once you are living in the country for a while, you can pretty much do anything and people don’t care about your resident status at all. For my daily lives in UK I only need my address and driving license. You pretty much have the feeling that you’ll be fine without bothering to do the paperwork, that’s how things work in the last 20-50 years.

that's... really abd

What do you mean? Any major employer in the UK will need more than that for you to work there.

Yes my friend moved from Sydney to London for work and he said it was a nightmare. He had his job in London lined up but he needed a UK bank account. He couldn’t get a bank account until he had a UK residence. His apartment lease needed his proof of employment.

He had to use his friend’s address for the bank account and then changed it.

I also moved from Sydney to Britain and just paid my rent from my Australian bank account until I got my British bank account. Your friend may not have thought to do this because he probably expected the ‘prison guard LARP’ attitude that Australian real estate agents have to also exist here in Britain.

Oh for sure, he was working for the UK government in some capacity so wanted to make sure everything was by the book.

When? Renting is far harder now than it was 20 years ago, even without right to rent checks. References, guarantors etc.

So only a few times in many years, I think most need an NI number only

That's the case now.

A decade ago a bank account, passport and bill with your home address was all that was needed to work legally.

But that’s exactly the point. A passport (assuming it’s a British passport) proves you have the right to work in the U.K. The commenter above is claiming all you need or ever needed is an address and a driving licence, and that’s nonsense.

I presented a foreign (EU) passport and opened a bank account in one of the biggest banks operating in the UK.

That was almost everything I needed, I didn't even have UK driving licence at the time.

This isn't true. I knew someone that lived illegally in the UK for almost a decade.

They could only get terrible restaurant jobs that didn't report anything to the government and were visited by immigration multiple times.

Even after getting an immigration lawyer couldn't help with citizenship.

What finally worked was having a kid and marrying a citizen.

That is what many people think before risking deportation for no other reason than not taking this seriously enough.

This is so wrong in pretty much all developed nations.

Are you American? Have you been to a Home Depot on Saturday?

And seen the disproportionate use of military style force to run down naturalized citizens in the parking lot with tanks and tear gas?

Picking up illegal immigrants who are hanging out in a parking lot and, ostensibly, are very honest about being unemployed, ultimately to pay them under the table and not hire them because they lack paperwork, is supposed to be some kind of gotcha with regards to how much you can get away with without citizenship in the US?

The ICE headlines in the USA makes a severe counterpoint

This is true until the wind changes. After Brexit quite a few long-stay Europeans without full paperwork were deported from the UK. Some had stayed for decades.

Meanwhile Sweden has started deporting British citizens who didn't do the paperwork.

If you travel out of a country, your odds of being allowed in without a visa, residency, or a native passport are basically zero.

I thought Japan requires 10 years residence for PR, but only 5 years residence to naturalize, in which case it wouldn't be surprising if many people naturalize before getting PR!

Not anymore.

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